James Norwood Pratt
Long before most Americans had heard of a gaiwan, a Dan Cong oolong, or the Wu Yi mountains of Fujian Province, James Norwood Pratt was writing about tea with the authority of someone who had spent hundreds of hours sitting in a teahouse learning its secrets cup by cup. Known as America’s Tea Sage and possibly the world’s most widely read authority on tea and tea lore, Pratt is the author of the landmark New Tea Lover’s Treasury — the book that helped ignite a renaissance in American tea culture — and the award-winning Tea Dictionary, named Best New Publication by the World Tea Expo in 2010.
In this conversation, Pratt takes us deep into the world of tea — its 4,000-year history in China, the fierce and often ruthless global trade that brought it to Western shores, and the quiet revolution now underway in America. He traces the origins of the tea trade through the Dutch and British East India companies, the opium transactions that financed it, the Scottish botanist who risked his life to steal China’s tea secrets, and the Indian tea martyr whose family endured colonial injustice only to reclaim their rightful place in the industry generations later. He explains why boiling water ruins a green tea, what a gaiwan is and why it may be the most intimate way to brew, and why the tea sitting in most American supermarket teabags bears almost no resemblance to what tea can truly be.
Pratt also shares the story of his friendship with Roy and Grace Fong — the founders of the Imperial Tea Court, the first traditional Chinese teahouse in North America, which opened its doors on Russian Hill in San Francisco on July 4th, 1993. It was there, standing before a cabinet full of teas he never expected to find on American soil, that Pratt’s education in the true art of tea began in earnest.
This is a conversation about far more than a beverage. It is about history, power, culture, health, and the slow, deliberate pleasure of paying attention to what is in your cup.
Better to be deprived of food for three days than tea for one.
~Ancient Chinese proverb
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